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Wednesday, January 27, 2016

A University Softens a Plan to Cut Tenured Faculty, but Professors Remain Wary

By Sarah Brown

January 27, 2016

Susan Czechowski has spent 15 years
on the faculty at Western Illinois University. Ms. Czechowski, a tenured
professor of art, said she has been an active member of the campus community
and a key contributor to her department’s recruitment and retention efforts.
"My classes are full," she said.

So last month, when she was called
into a meeting by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and told that
she would be laid off, she was taken aback. More than 40 other faculty members
— including a dozen with tenure — received similar news.

Western Illinois has for years
struggled with declining enrollment and reduced state support, a predicament
compounded by the fact that Illinois has yet to pass a budget for the fiscal
year that started last July. That’s left public colleges without state money for the past seven months.

The institution had already combined
some departments and curbed other spending, said Kathleen Neumann, interim
provost and academic vice president, leaving no choice but to look at layoffs.
Campus officials said they had turned to enrollment numbers to determine which
departments should be scaled back and which faculty positions should be cut.

That had been the plan, at least.
This week, Western Illinois’s president, Jack Thomas, changed course,
announcing that while faculty cuts were still needed, tenured professors would
be spared.

But for how long? Ms. Czechowski
asked. And why did she end up on a layoff list at all? She and other tenured
faculty members say they weren’t given much of an explanation. Moreover, 30 of
their colleagues — including 10 assistant professors — remain on the verge of
losing their jobs.

‘Nothing
Can Be Confirmed’

Those are among several concerns
that have made for a tense and confusing situation at Western Illinois.

And a meeting of the university’s
Board of Trustees on Monday, during which the board voted to authorize faculty
cuts, left many professors on the layoff list uncertain about where they stood.

Ms. Neumann said that President
Thomas had announced the removal of all tenured professors from the layoff list
during the board meeting. She attributed that to Mr. Thomas’s prepared remarks,
in which he said that "my leadership team and I are still willing to
remove tenured faculty as of today, January 25, 2016, from consideration for
layoffs at this time." But that statement came in the context of comments
about failed negotiations between administrators and the employee union.

When several tenured faculty members
on the layoff list were asked in interviews on Tuesday whether they had been
told that they were no longer being laid off, they said they had not. After
speaking with The Chronicle around noon, Ms. Czechowski said she had
called the president’s office and the provost’s office to ask about the status
of the tenured professors. "I was told that nothing can be
confirmed," she said.

Later on Tuesday, Mr. Thomas told
the Faculty Senate that no faculty members with tenure would be affected by the
current round of layoffs. Still, many professors fear that the uncertainty
isn’t over: A faculty advisory committee has convened to examine
academic-program cuts, and Ms. Neumann said additional faculty layoffs were not
out of the question.

Humanities
Hard-Hit

Western Illinois officials are
looking for about $10 million in savings across the campus, Ms. Neumann said.
Enrollment at the university has dropped by one-fourth since the fall of 2011,
she said, while the number of professors has decreased by just 12 percent.

"It became obvious that we
really needed to work more aggressively to get our staffing levels in
line," she said.

To do that, Ms. Neumann said, the
university’s academic leaders divided up each college into programs — some
departments, like art and history, included several such programs — and
evaluated each of them on the number of majors, graduates, student credit
hours, and faculty members.

Then they sent informal layoff
notices to professors with the least seniority in each program marked as having
a low enrollment, starting with non-tenured faculty members and followed by
those with tenure. That’s how someone like Ms. Czechowski could have ended up
on the list, Ms. Neumann said.

Originally, four layoffs were
scheduled in art, including three professors with tenure and one on the tenure
track. That initial list also hit the history faculty with four layoffs.
History is a fundamental part of the general-education curriculum, Ms. Neumann
said, but the department has lost nearly half of its majors since the fall of
2011.

"The same metrics were applied
to all of the programs," she said. "We’re simply trying to get
current staffing in line with where the student demand is."

Some faculty members raised concerns
that the humanities were bearing the brunt of the layoffs, suggesting a broader
shift in the university toward a more vocational mission. William Thompson,
president of the employee-union chapter at Western Illinois and a professor in
the libraries division, provided The Chronicle with a breakdown of which
colleges and departments were designated to see layoffs, and more than half of
the positions on the original list were in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Among them were two of the
African-American-studies department’s four tenured professors, not including
the department chair. One of them, Jo-Ann Morgan, said she felt that Western
Illinois officials were "taking advantage of the budget problem to reshape
the university."

Ms. Neumann said the university had
"no intentions" of eliminating all courses in African-American and
women’s studies. What’s undecided, she said, is whether to offer those programs
as majors.

That question is under consideration
by the faculty committee reviewing the possible program cuts, she said. The
group is also considering whether to recommend eliminating the philosophy,
religious studies, and public-health majors, among others, she added.

‘Everybody
Comes Off This List’

The furor over the layoffs grew in
large part, professors said, because the employee union’s contract stipulates
that only the university’s board has the authority to make employee layoffs.
Western Illinois leaders said they had sent informal notices, which were not
final, before the board’s vote to give faculty members more time to find other jobs.

As the union’s leaders expressed
outrage over what they saw as a lack of due process, the board in December
postponed a vote on authorizing the layoffs. The union then entered into
negotiations with senior administrators, hoping to prevent the cuts by arguing
that university leaders had not upheld the contract’s terms.

Throughout the negotiations, Mr.
Thompson said he and other faculty leaders proposed solutions for cutting costs
without resorting to layoffs, including various combinations of postponed
salary increases, pay givebacks, and retirement incentives. Administrators
rejected all of their proposals, he said.

But Robert J. Hironimus-Wendt, a
professor of sociology, said he didn’t think the union had done enough to find
viable solutions. Mr. Hironimus-Wendt said he was pushing the union’s leaders
to allow a vote on tenured faculty members' taking a small pay cut, which he
said he and a number of his colleagues were willing to do.

At the very least, the union should
give up the 1-percent raise slated to take effect in July, he said. "The
idea that I would not give up a $50 per month pay increase so that my friend
could save their job — to me, that’s just wrong," he said.

For now, tenured faculty members at
Western Illinois appear to be safe, though that’s not what Sherry Lindquist, an
assistant professor of art history, heard at Monday’s board meeting.

Ms. Lindquist, who is on the layoff
list, believes President Thomas’s willingness to take tenured-faculty cuts off
the table for now reassured the board into voting for the resolution. But Mr.
Thomas wouldn’t promise, she said, "that they won’t lay them off the next
day."

That lack of clarity has left Ms.
Czechowski wary. "The communication throughout this process has been
nonsensical," she said.

Several assistant professors,
meanwhile, continue to face the reality that they could soon receive official
notices that they have lost their jobs. Ms. Lindquist said her removal would
leave the university with one art historian — and no one who specializes in
non-Western art.

Holly Stovall, an assistant
professor of women’s studies, said she recently completed her
tenure-application file and felt confident she met all the criteria. Ms.
Stovall had expected to get tenure within the next couple of months, and still
believes she should. But now that she’s on the layoff list, it might not matter
anymore, she said.

"It’s doing all this work for
five years," she said, "and having the door slammed in my face."

Failing the Test for Faculty Unions

Those
awaiting the National Labor Relations Board’s decision regarding an
adjunct union bid at Pacific Lutheran University knew that it would have
significant implications for those trying to form collective bargaining
units at religiously affiliated colleges and universities; such
institutions often successfully challenge union bids based on religious
grounds.

But when the pro-union Pacific Lutheran decision
finally arrived in late 2014, it came with a twist that appeared to
possibly pave the way toward full-time faculty and even tenure-line
faculty unions at private colleges and universities, against which there
is also a long-standing legal precedent. In addition to new guidelines
to determine whether or not a college is sufficiently religious in
nature to exempt it from NLRB oversight, the decision also included new
guidelines to determine whether faculty jobs are managerial enough to
preclude full-time or even tenure-line faculty members from unionizing.
It was something of a shock to many private colleges that assumed they
could reject collective bargaining.

In short, the NLRB said colleges and universities couldn’t block
faculty unions just because they were religious in nature -- colleges
seeking to block unions had to prove their missions conflicted with
collective bargaining. And the colleges and universities couldn’t just
say tenure-line faculty members were managers and therefore precluded
from collective bargaining -- they had to show it.
But the Pacific Lutheran decision may not be as promising to
union-minded faculty members as it first appeared. In the first major
test of the new managerial guidelines regarding full-time faculty
members, a regional NLRB office denied a bid by tenure-line faculty
members at Carroll College, in Montana, to form a union affiliated with
the National Education Association and the American Federation of
Teachers. And in contrast to a recent string of regional NLRB approvals
of adjunct union bids at religious institutions, the Carroll decision
backed the college’s claim that its Roman Catholic identity put it
outside NLRB jurisdiction.

“We are disappointed,” said Kay Satre, a professor of English at
Carroll and a spokeswoman for the proposed bargaining unit. Noting that
the Pacific Lutheran decision was a major factor behind the drive, she
added, “We were hopeful that the NLRB was going to rule in our favor,
but we also knew that it was going to be challenging.”

In its Pacific Lutheran decision, the NLRB said that to determine
whether faculty members have managerial authority, one must examine
faculty control of academic programs, enrollment management policies,
finances, academic policies, and personnel policies and decisions. It
stipulated that “greater weight” be given to the first three concerns.
That was significant because many private college administrators say
they defer to faculty members in curricular matters but not necessarily
enrollment and finances. And it stands in contrast to the 1980 U.S.
Supreme Court decision Yeshiva v. NLRB,
in which the court determined that tenure-line faculty members are de
facto managers and therefore not entitled to collective bargaining. That
decision hasn't sat well with many union backers, including some
members of the NLRB, who over the years have said that Yeshiva was based
on a set of facts at a time when private college faculty members had
much more power than they do now.

The Carroll decision,
issued by Ronald K. Hooks, a Seattle-based NLRB officer, says that the
college met its burden of establishing that faculty members exercise
managerial authority with regard to academic programs and policy and
personnel matters. Addressing the Pacific Lutheran guidance on weighting
factors, Hooks wrote that that decision “does not provide clarity as to
which types or numbers of factors a party must prove in order to meet
its burden,” and that the academic and personnel factors were therefore
enough. Hooks paid particular attention to the fact that tenure-line
faculty, through relevant committees and a Faculty Assembly, make
decisions involving the college’s curricula, major, minor and
certificate offerings and their requirements. Although there was
evidence that administrators at times made decisions contrary to faculty
recommendations, he said, it wasn’t enough to override faculty input.
Regarding personnel matters, he said, faculty members are responsible
for hiring and promoting their peers, with minimal administrative
influence.

Regarding a college’s religious identity, the Pacific Lutheran
decision was less prescriptive to avoid what the NLRB called “trolling”
an institution’s operation. But it said that it extended the “‘holding
out’ principle to our analysis of faculty members’ roles; that is, we
shall decline [NLRB] jurisdiction if the university ‘holds out’ its
faculty members, in communications to current or potential students and
faculty members, and the community at large, as performing a specific
role in creating or maintaining the university’s religious purpose or
mission.”

In other words, it said, “Faculty members who are not expected to
perform a specific role in creating or maintaining the school’s
religious educational environment are indistinguishable from faculty at
colleges and universities which do not identify themselves as religious
institutions and which are indisputably subject to the board’s
jurisdiction. Both faculty provide nonreligious instruction and are
hired, fired and assessed under criteria that do not implicate religious
considerations.” That’s in contrast to the 1979 Supreme Court case NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, which established a legal precedent against faculty unions in religious schools.

In the Carroll decision, Hooks wrote that on many levels, the
proposed unit would pass the Pacific Lutheran test. Faculty members
don’t have to be Catholic to teach or be promoted at the college, for
example, and its mission in fact encourages diversity of thought.
Professors are academic advisers and not spiritual advisers, he said.
But Hooks cited testimony that faculty members could be subject to
discharge for “continued, serious disrespect or disregard for the
Catholic character or mission” of the college, as described in the
faculty handbook.

Satre said that she was surprised that Hooks’s decision, at least
regarding the religious standards, appeared to hinge so much on that
testimony. She said there was only one case, over a decade ago, in which
the college had acted against a professor on those grounds.

But Hooks’s decision notes that even if he were to reject the
college’s religious argument, “I would nevertheless dismiss the instant
petition as the unit faculty are managers within the meaning” of the
National Labor Relations Act.

William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the
Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions
at Hunter College of the City University of New York, called the
decision an “interesting one.”

“This is the first post-Pacific Lutheran University decision to apply
the refined standards for managerial status to tenured and tenure-track
faculty,” he said. Prior regional director decisions have applied the
refined standards favorably
to adjunct faculty in proposed units at Duquesne University, Manhattan
College, Saint Xavier University and Seattle University, he said. That
is, those colleges did not meet the burden of proof regarding their
religious identity, insofar as they would preclude unions on campus.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Only 14 percent of the students who start out in a community
college transfer to a four-year university and earn a bachelor’s degree
within six years, according to a report released on Tuesday by three groups that are studying ways to plug the leaky pipeline between two- and four-year colleges.
The report was a joint effort of the Community College Research
Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, the Aspen Institute’s
College Excellence Program, and the National Student Clearinghouse
Research Center.

The research breaks down how students fare in different states. Even
in states with the best track records, including Florida, Illinois, and
Kansas, only about one in five community-college students transfers and
graduates within six years of entering a two-year college. At the other
end of the spectrum, some states have transfer-and-graduation rates in
the single digits.

The report is the first phase of an effort supported by the Carnegie
Corporation of New York and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley
Charitable Trust to help colleges improve their transfer rates.
“Too many students are failed by the current system of transfer
between community colleges and universities,” Davis Jenkins, a senior
research associate at the Community College Research Center, said in a
written statement. “Greater success for more students will cut down on
the waste in taxpayer money when students drop out or lose credits as
they transfer.”

The report also said that low-income students, who are most likely to
start at community colleges, are less likely than their higher-income
peers to transfer and graduate with a four-year degree.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Young Invincibles released report cards today
that grade states on their support of public higher education. The
results weren't great, and only one state -- Wyoming, the least
populated state in the U.S., got an A (seven states received a B).

In its report, Young Invincibles, a think tank that advocates on
behalf of jobs, health care and education for young adults, considered
factors like a state's growth or decline in public higher education
support since the recession, how states compared to other states in
terms of support, a state's support to disadvantaged students, and
whether states offer aid on the basis of need or merit.
The report notes that the share of college a family pays has
increased since the recession as well, growing from 36 percent in 2008
to around 50 percent in 2014. Families were left with the largest burden
in Maine, at 82 percent, and the lowest cost share in Wyoming, at 15
percent.

Among the more than 40 factors Young Invincibles considered when
grading states is how much tuition at public four- and two-year colleges
has risen since the recession. In Arizona, which received an F from the
group, tuition rose 72 percent from 2008 to 2014 (Georgia and Louisiana
followed close behind, with increases of 68 and 66 percent,
respectively). Meanwhile, Maine, Maryland, Missouri and Montana each had
tuition increases below 10 percent during that time.

The report also found that just two states spend as much on higher
education as they did before the recession (Alaska and North Dakota). As
of 2014, Louisiana spent 41 percent less on public higher education
than it did in 2008. Seven states kept investment decreases below 10
percent during that time.